On Being Weird (a Brief Manifesto)

Writer and actor (Chuck & Buck, The Good Girl, The School of Rock, Freaks and Geeks); director (Year of the Dog); cocreator of Enlightened; poet laureate of the outcast
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For me it was never about trying to cultivate a personality of weird. But I guess if you're in the weird eye of the hurricane, you don't notice. I want to feel authentic, and in order to be authentic, I'm perceived as weird.

There was a period of my career as a writer, and just as a person, when I wanted to subvert stuff more, to shout, "See how humankind is! How this is all bullshit?" But after a while, as you get older, you start to feel like that's not that deep. It's not that deep to say, "Humans are base," or "Society has hypocrisy." What's really deep is when you have a wisdom that helps you find the way out of the labyrinth. Because there are two kinds of weird. There's weird that comes out of a lack of consciousness about the world. I've seen that with kids in high school, where they don't fit in, so they become goths. They exude this Be afraid of me vibe. But I'm swimming toward a different weird. A weird that has clarity of mind, that is more about seeing through things and wanting to make sure the choices I'm making are true to something I think is important. I want to live in a way that's free and liberated and creative, but also positive and hopefully liberating for others—as opposed to putting out something that creates darkness or chaos. I don't want to be scary. I want people to be like, "Oh, he seems like he's having a good time. Maybe he has the secret to something that I haven't figured out."

I guess I just want to be a healthy weirdo. Weirdness first happens in adolescence. Little kids are all freaks. They all have crazy imaginations.

When you hang out with a bunch of little kids, it's like you're in a mental institution. They talk to the walls, they do all this weird stuff, and that's accepted because it's part of those formative years. But when you hit eleven or twelve, you start to feel like you don't want to do something weird, because you'll get picked on, or you won't get the girl. But when I went through that, I was like, "What?" It was like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. "You are not a body snatcher!" People gave up on me, but that allowed me to find my own version of what it is to live. I retreated into my own imaginative worlds, as opposed to obsessing over sports, or whatever it was that was going to get me to be popular. Because I just didn't care.

Last fall I went back to my high school for an alumni roundtable about the entertainment business. It was on Halloween. Sean Bailey, the president of production at Walt Disney, was there, and all these big agents. I was the only artist. And I mean, it was Halloween, so I wore an elephant suit. People thought it was hilarious. But had I done that back in high school, people would have said, "Oh, God." They would have rolled their eyes.

But the thing is, most people who are weird really aren't that weird, and most people who project a sense of normality aren't as normal as they want to think. People say, "Okay, it seems like the world wants me to be this." And that works for you for a certain amount of time. But then you hit the wall—maybe at eighteen, or at twenty-five, maybe even at forty-five—where you say, "I did all these things that people said would be the key to getting along, so why am I not blissing out? Why do I feel more trapped than free?" I may have made some mistakes, but I didn't make those mistakes. I made my own. And I could somehow unravel those mistakes before they became a noose.

Weird is liberating. You can just give up trying to fit in. Because you never will.

And yet in a way, now you will. There's something going on in our culture that's allowing people to let their freak flags fly. We live in an individualistic, selfie world. There's more room for different kinds of people now. It's not like the fifties. Once the toothpaste of weirdness gets out of the tube, you can't put it back in, you know?

I've always liked movies that say, "There's another way to live. There's another way to be happy," because those feelings stay with you your whole life. That's true about weird people, too. They're seekers. They stay with you. There is something about them that lingers.